January 8, 2014

FORBES:More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity. “People who have high intelligence and ambition often earn college and advanced degrees. Sometimes that formal education is important in their later success, but many say that their education had very little to do with it. Conversely, some extremely successful people dropped out of college or never attended at all. And as those ridiculous Occupy Wall Street protests taught us, huge numbers of college graduates are unemployed or employed only in jobs that don’t call for anything more than basic trainability.”

My great grandfather was the first in the family born in the new world about a decade after the family of nine moved to Texas from Germany in 1849. He was orphaned at six and went to live in an uncle's attic. He had three years of formal schooling (roughly 3rd, 4th and 5th) like most kids of the time, plus the family parlor time each evening spent reading, conversing, singing or writing letters.

At 12, he was given a quarter (good for almost a week of room & board), told he was a man and sent out in the world. He landed an apprenticeship as a tinner's assistant. He parlayed that into a retail hardware business which he later parlayed into a bank, becoming a millionaire in the process.

A fluke? His wife, a lawman's daughter from San Antonio had three sisters who also married men who went on to become millionaires in the 1890s. A statistical oddity? No, inflation had been low the entire century so that thrift and savings paid off. Taxes were also low (the 16th Amendment was still a ways off). It was the greatest period of wealth formation in our nation's history.

Did they suffer from lack of education? Not to judge their letters and journals which feature writing of greater clarity and humanity than most college grads today. They were quite familiar with opera, the literature of the time and versed in politics.

I have a B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Biochemistry. So, what do I do for a living? I'm a Senior Network Analyst. I work with people who are Network Engineers - and are damn good at it - who never went to college.

Will you show up for work on time every day? Sober? Ready to work? Are you trainable - do you have sufficient native intelligence and a basic education in math, science, English, etc. to be able to understand what you're being told? Will you concentrate on it and work at learning it? Will you work hard on applying it?

In most careers you'll have to be trained by your employer once you get out of college anyway.

To me, the real issue is the smothering of opportunity, for those with degrees and those without.

Whenever there's a jobs boom, level of education isn't nearly as important as achievement. But now we've got too many thirsty animals (I'm one of them) at a shrinking water hole, scrambling for what seems to be a diminishing resource.

Having a degree is a purely defensive move; it keeps you from being automatically excluded in the hiring process.

There are intangible values to gain from education. I last worked a differential at my final exam in 1975 and I last worked an integral in 1976. The discipline of calculus has stood me in good stead.I've never made economic policy but I use my education in economics to help me vote better.There are also practical skills that come from some kind of training -- management and writing among softer skills, software design and medicine among the harder skills.Education and skill do not equate; effort and achievement do not equate. There's a poor habit of saying that, since achievement almost always requires much effort, people who put out a lot of effort must be achieving. Similarly, there's a habit of assuming that an educated person is also skilled. This is only sometimes true, even in harder areas of study. My dad mentioned helping a newly minted electric engineer build a circuit and how she said, "Son of a gun, electrons really do flow that way."When few could read or write, automation and its higher levels of productivity were much more difficult. When nearly all can read and write, technology and its benefits are much easier to use. The curve is steep, though. Having a lot of people study geology can easily result in a glut of geologists and they'd hit rock bottom.

I remember watching some Occupy Brain Dead protester on TV being interviewed.

He had a Masters in Puppetry. No, I am not kidding. He had something like $35k in student loan debt to pay off for it, too. But, he couldn't find a job in 'his field'. So, he was b!tching about it at Occupy Brain Dead.

He [Obama] set forth a goal of again having “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being well-educated (not to be confused with college educated), but there have to be jobs in which you can apply your education. Without jobs, you're just a well-educated unemployment (or underemployment) statistic. Young people can tell you all about that.

Glenn, I believe a large part of it is the major field of the degree. Newt Gingrich talked of the pseudo educated and my fathe talked of "trust fund degrees".So many of the angry left arethe people who majored in the softest of the soft and have no knowledge/skills anyone else wants Indeed , I think it's likely the lower the SAt of a major,the higher the proportion of DemocratsCorwin

Soft majors and no knowledge/skills is one thing. Add to an unwillingness to work at anything that might make them appear 'subservient', and the coffin is nailed shut on the prospect the angry left doing anything useful.

This leaves them free to remake society to conform to their half-baked ideas.

My great grandfather was the first in the family born in the new world about a decade after the family of nine moved to Texas from Germany in 1849. He was orphaned at six and went to live in an uncle's attic. He had three years of formal schooling (roughly 3rd, 4th and 5th) like most kids of the time, plus the family parlor time each evening spent reading, conversing, singing or writing letters.

At 12, he was given a quarter (good for almost a week of room & board), told he was a man and sent out in the world. He landed an apprenticeship as a tinner's assistant. He parlayed that into a retail hardware business which he later parlayed into a bank, becoming a millionaire in the process.

A fluke? His wife, a lawman's daughter from San Antonio had three sisters who also married men who went on to become millionaires in the 1890s. A statistical oddity? No, inflation had been low the entire century so that thrift and savings paid off. Taxes were also low (the 16th Amendment was still a ways off). It was the greatest period of wealth formation in our nation's history.

Did they suffer from lack of education? Not to judge their letters and journals which feature writing of greater clarity and humanity than most college grads today. They were quite familiar with opera, the literature of the time and versed in politics.

Well, no. They had a lack of formal instruction. They were probably more educated because when they learned, they learned because the wanted or needed to and had not been infected with "school helplessness".

There's more truth to that than you might think. Any venture capitalist will tell you it is far from unusual to find F's on the transcripts of startup CEOs.

My uncle sat me down when I was college bound and told me, "In my dorm, it was us engineering majors and the business majors. Every evening we had to tell them to quiet down so we could book it. Every weekend we watched them load their cars to go home or who-knows where while we booked it. They went to school for four years. We went for five, and when we graduated we went to work for the business majors." I changed my major.

I have a B.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Biochemistry. So, what do I do for a living? I'm a Senior Network Analyst. I work with people who are Network Engineers - and are damn good at it - who never went to college.

Will you show up for work on time every day? Sober? Ready to work? Are you trainable - do you have sufficient native intelligence and a basic education in math, science, English, etc. to be able to understand what you're being told? Will you concentrate on it and work at learning it? Will you work hard on applying it?

In most careers you'll have to be trained by your employer once you get out of college anyway.

InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.